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The Minnesota House has passed a higher-education budget proposal that would freeze undergraduate tuition at the state's colleges and universities. The bill also bans bonuses and gives the legislature greater oversight of schools. State Sen. Terri Bonoff, chair of the Senate Higher Education Committee, said the money should be used to improve the schools overall. "While you think you might be doing our students a favor, I would suggest that a hard freeze ... is not in the best interest for our students," Bonoff said.

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A higher-education funding bill passed by the Minnesota House of Representatives includes $57 million in new spending, but that may not be enough to keep a statewide tuition freeze in place, college leaders say. Under the measure, two-year state colleges would keep tuition steady next year with a 1% decrease the following year, while four-year state colleges would see a 3% increase in tuition next year with a freeze in the second year.

Massachusetts' higher-education commissioner is withholding more than $2 million in construction funding and $197,000 for education from Westfield State University in Massachusetts after the school's president failed to meet a deadline to provide documentation on disputed travel expenses. Faculty and librarians plan to hold a no-confidence vote on Oct. 16 for university President Evan Dobelle, according to the head of the school's faculty and librarian union.

Tech-savvy college graduates increasingly are launching their careers at their own startups, says Dane Stangler, director of research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation, an entre­pre­neur­ship research nonprofit based in Kansas City, Mo. He says reasons for this trend include crowdfunding options, an increase in the number of entrepreneurship programs at colleges, and simply the appeal of starting one's own company.

College students are tapping into alumni networks and using their campus career-services offices to help them find jobs. Some services are free to students, but other schools such as the University of California Riverside, for example, charge $10 annually for alumni using into its services.

Colleges and universities strive for diversity in their student body, but a diverse faculty is also imperative, Langston University education professor Matthew Lynch writes in this blog post. Lynch points to statistics that reveal just over 12% of full-time faculty are minorities. Part of the problem may be the competitive nature of hiring, Lynch suggests. "This is not to say that there are not women and minorities with high qualifications but rather to point out that sometimes sex and race are simply not part of the hiring equation," he writes.